To build the 2028 Fathom, Ford went off and started a car company inside its own car company. A small team in Southern California, deliberately kept at a distance from the Dearborn, MI HQ, spent four and a half years rethinking how an electric vehicle gets designed and manufactured, and the first result is an electric pickup that will start under $30,000. Alan Clarke, Vice President of Advanced Development Projects at Ford and a Tesla veteran before that, runs the skunk works that made it happen. He explains why the team is staffed largely with people from consumer electronics, EV startups, and Formula One rather than from inside the auto industry. Contrary to conventional rhetoric, he also explains why studying what Tesla and the Chinese automakers have already shipped is what he calls “rearview mirror analysis.” There’s also the question of the name. Fathom beat out hundreds of candidates, but why? And when Ford held an open call for mapping software to every provider in the business, Apple came out on top, which Alan walks through in detail. As for the truck’s range, he knows the number, and we grill him to try and get a clue. Join Craig Cole and co-host Sam Abuelsamid as they dive deep with Alan to find out whether Ford has really found its Model T moment, in this episode of GreenCars, The Podcast.
Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
4:52 - From Tesla to Ford's Skunk Works
11:56 - Vertical Integration at Long Beach
20:01 - The Universal EV Platform Explained
27:19 - How Ford Hit a Sub-$30,000 Price
29:37 - Solving Ford's Software Problem
34:36 - Where the Name "Fathom" Came From
37:26 - Why Apple Maps Beat Google
40:08 - How Much Range Will Fathom Have?
42:18 - Batteries, Towing & Charging Trade-Offs
47:34 - Three for the Road
50:39 - Conclusions
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